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You’re only a beginner once. As
your skills evolve, you transform
from beginner to novice, then to
apprentice, and finally expert. It’s
a gradual process, and in the world
of robotics, a potentially expensive
one as you collect new hardware
to play with.

The Beginner Bot expandable platform is one way
to ease the burden of starting from scratch each time
you cut a new notch in your robotics belt. The idea is
that you start with a small, inexpensive (under $20)
chassis, then swap out old parts and add new ones as
you progress through your robot building career.

The last four installments of this series have covered
how to build the Beginner Bot platform using wood or
plastic, how to steer it using mechanical switches from
a tethered control panel, and how to convert the robot
to fully electronic control — complete with basis sensors.

Previous articles have also described adapting the
Beginner Bot to the popular PICAXE and Arduino
microcontrollers. In this fifth and final part, you’ll see
how to use the Parallax Propeller to provide fully
autonomous control.

The finished Beginner Bot as described in this article
is shown in Figure 1. Before continuing, note that this
article relies on construction details described in the
earlier parts of this series. There’s no need to build
each stage of the Beginner Bot, but if you’re just
starting out you’ll want to refer to the earlier articles.

All About the
Parallax Propeller

Like the PICAXE and Arduino — we covered
these in earlier articles in this series — the
What sets the Propeller apart from most

FIGURE 1. The completed Phase 5 version
of the Beginner Bot with a Parallax Propeller
Board of Education (PropBOE) microcontroller
development board, complete with sensors
and wiring.